1. Technical Field
The disclosure generally relates to organizing devices in a distributed network environment. More particularly, the disclosure relates to automatically organizing devices in a distributed network environment into clusters.
2. Background
Devices in a distributed networking environment may perform a variety of services, such as printing, copying and/or performing other operations with respect to documents.
Within a customer-specified boundary, organizing devices into clusters is conventionally performed by a human administrator. Clusters are generally formed based on the physical proximity and/or capabilities of particular devices. In addition, a perceived need for particular functions can drive cluster formation for particular groups of users, such as a color printer being assigned to a marketing department.
Manually organizing device clusters places a burden on the administrator. In addition, the administrator might not be able to consider whether particular capabilities are available for particular users or user groups, or whether device usage patterns dictate a new arrangement of devices for users or user groups. Moreover, manual clustering can provide inconsistent levels of service because devices can intermittently join or leave the network. For example, a device may leave a network because of a software and/or hardware failure. In addition, a device may be unavailable if excessive load occurs on a device. Conversely, a device may join a network after it recovers from a failure or if it is connected to a network for the first time.
A concern of many network administrators is the security of the internal network. A system that permits a plurality of devices to communicate across a firewall poses a security risk. Conventionally, each device in a network can contact a remote monitoring system, such as an edge-host, external to the local network. As such, multiple potential points of failure can arise. Monitoring each potential point of failure can be overwhelming or unmanageable for a network administrator to perform.
In addition, usage information for devices in a network is generally not examined. As such, human administrators typically do not consider either the dynamic usage patterns of users or users' willingness to make trade-offs, such as accepting a reduced print speed and/or a less proximate device in order to receive an increase in the print quality of the output documents. Other trade-offs, such as requesting specific qualities for a document production that are only achievable using one or more particular devices, are also typically not considered. Ignorance of such information can result in an administrator being unable to correlate usage of a device with factors that a customer might value, such as it proximity to a device, print quality, print speed and/or a job completion guarantee.
Idle devices in a network represent an inefficient use of resources. When a device is idle, the device has the capability of assisting with other document operations, management functions, diagnostics and/or other computational functions. Currently, no framework is available that utilizes device idle time effectively while being non-invasive to customer requests. Current methods lack the ability to bundle and dispatch aforementioned jobs when faced with sudden customer demand. Although each user can access a static cluster configuration, such access does not guarantee the efficient usage of the cluster and does not foster collaboration across clusters, which can lead to additional idle time.
Other concerns include an inability of current device network architectures to multicast relevant downloads from a service provider and/or to upload aggregated information in a batch job to a service provider. Such information may include diagnostic requests, diagnostic reports and/or maintenance reports. Other information can also be included within such download/upload transfers.
What is needed is a system and method that enable devices in a document services network to self-organize.
A need exists for a system and method that reduce the time, effort and expense of organizing devices in a document services network.
A need exists for a system and method for organizing devices in a way that improves the overall security of a document services network.
A need exists for a system and method that analyze device usage information to appropriately assign service requests based on user-defined parameters and device availability.
A need exists for a system and method that reduce device idle time in a document services network.
A further need exists for a system and method that enables control information to be efficiently uploaded to and downloaded from a remote system in a device-controlled batch process.
The present embodiments are directed to solving one or more At the above-listed problems.